at the moment, economically speaking anyway, she was a breath of fresh air, and just came out of the blue and reached out to everybody.’
The star even had a message for Susan: ‘If you want to sing together – let’s.’
Days after being an unknown and generating a million smirks and eye-rolls with her ridiculous suggestion that she would ‘like to be like Elaine Paige’, Susan had the superstar herself not just coming out with a few polite words of praise, but a fulsome, generous and spot-on assessment of Susan and her appeal. And she wanted to sing a duet!
There was more praise to come Susan’s way from another singer familiar with ‘I Dreamed a Dream’.
The two words most often placed before Patti LuPone’s name are ‘Broadway’ and ‘Diva’, and with very good reason. The singer, a contemporary of Elaine Paige, had a career which in many ways mirrored the Brit’s: she starred in Evita and Sunset Boulevard and, most relevantly as far as Susan was concerned, in 1985, she created the part of Fantine in the Royal Shakespeare Company–Cameron Mackintosh production of Les Misérables . In recognition of that debut performance with the Royal Shakespeare Company she became the first American actress to win an Olivier Award.
She too was enraptured by Susan.
The two ‘came together’ on a CBS television show in America: Susan from the front room of her home in Blackburn, Patti on the telephone in the States. Standing ramrod straight in her small living room with its cheap-looking furniture and reproduction paintings on the walls, Susan, wearing a plain white dress and a chunky pearl necklace, answered the by now familiar questions about her performance and the reaction to it, before singing, at the interviewers’ request, a few bars of the song.
Across the other side of the Atlantic, Patti LuPone was listening and she immediately said, ‘I heard that, I cried. Susan, you got pluck girl. It’s not an easy song, it’s the ending actually that is the roughest part, as Susan will attest I’m sure. What you have to hit at the very end of thesong that is difficult. It’s an emotional song. It’s the first ballad in the musical and it comes very early in the show. I saw her performance on YouTube like everybody else. Someone that works in my press agent’s office in New York sent it to me, was it yesterday or the day before, I believe the day before yesterday. My husband and I watched it and I started to cry. Susan you made me cry.’
Asked how she rated Susan’s rendition, LuPone said, ‘From what I could tell on YouTube it was pretty great. So I can imagine what it was like live or on British TV. You can’t really tell a lot from YouTube, but it was pretty powerful. I started to cry. I thought Susan has so much courage and so much pluck.’
The ‘SuBo effect’ worked for Patti too. Susan’s version of the song had the knock-on effect of boosting sales of LuPone’s original recording and putting it in the charts. LuPone wasn’t the only Les Misérables ‘old hand’ who was enchanted.
Alain Boublil was the librettist on the original French production of Les Mis , which he co-wrote with composer Claude-Michel Schönberg. ‘You expect nothing, and then she opens her mouth and you get three or four of the most exciting moments I have ever seen on television,’ he said. ‘I think of Edith Piaf. Piaf was a small woman who looked like nothing. And then she opened her mouth, and this beautiful sound came out.’
Boublil, who also wrote Miss Saigon , said of that YouTube appearance:
‘Act I: She arrives and everyone is laughing at her. Act II: She bowls them over. Act III: Everyone is out of their seats.
‘You cannot plan any of that. My wife was crying when she saw it. Even the most cynical people I know have been moved.’
‘I Dreamed a Dream’ was one of the first songs Boublil wrote for the musical in 1979. ‘I remember I was in a car driving in the north of France and was working on
The star even had a message for Susan: ‘If you want to sing together – let’s.’
Days after being an unknown and generating a million smirks and eye-rolls with her ridiculous suggestion that she would ‘like to be like Elaine Paige’, Susan had the superstar herself not just coming out with a few polite words of praise, but a fulsome, generous and spot-on assessment of Susan and her appeal. And she wanted to sing a duet!
There was more praise to come Susan’s way from another singer familiar with ‘I Dreamed a Dream’.
The two words most often placed before Patti LuPone’s name are ‘Broadway’ and ‘Diva’, and with very good reason. The singer, a contemporary of Elaine Paige, had a career which in many ways mirrored the Brit’s: she starred in Evita and Sunset Boulevard and, most relevantly as far as Susan was concerned, in 1985, she created the part of Fantine in the Royal Shakespeare Company–Cameron Mackintosh production of Les Misérables . In recognition of that debut performance with the Royal Shakespeare Company she became the first American actress to win an Olivier Award.
She too was enraptured by Susan.
The two ‘came together’ on a CBS television show in America: Susan from the front room of her home in Blackburn, Patti on the telephone in the States. Standing ramrod straight in her small living room with its cheap-looking furniture and reproduction paintings on the walls, Susan, wearing a plain white dress and a chunky pearl necklace, answered the by now familiar questions about her performance and the reaction to it, before singing, at the interviewers’ request, a few bars of the song.
Across the other side of the Atlantic, Patti LuPone was listening and she immediately said, ‘I heard that, I cried. Susan, you got pluck girl. It’s not an easy song, it’s the ending actually that is the roughest part, as Susan will attest I’m sure. What you have to hit at the very end of thesong that is difficult. It’s an emotional song. It’s the first ballad in the musical and it comes very early in the show. I saw her performance on YouTube like everybody else. Someone that works in my press agent’s office in New York sent it to me, was it yesterday or the day before, I believe the day before yesterday. My husband and I watched it and I started to cry. Susan you made me cry.’
Asked how she rated Susan’s rendition, LuPone said, ‘From what I could tell on YouTube it was pretty great. So I can imagine what it was like live or on British TV. You can’t really tell a lot from YouTube, but it was pretty powerful. I started to cry. I thought Susan has so much courage and so much pluck.’
The ‘SuBo effect’ worked for Patti too. Susan’s version of the song had the knock-on effect of boosting sales of LuPone’s original recording and putting it in the charts. LuPone wasn’t the only Les Misérables ‘old hand’ who was enchanted.
Alain Boublil was the librettist on the original French production of Les Mis , which he co-wrote with composer Claude-Michel Schönberg. ‘You expect nothing, and then she opens her mouth and you get three or four of the most exciting moments I have ever seen on television,’ he said. ‘I think of Edith Piaf. Piaf was a small woman who looked like nothing. And then she opened her mouth, and this beautiful sound came out.’
Boublil, who also wrote Miss Saigon , said of that YouTube appearance:
‘Act I: She arrives and everyone is laughing at her. Act II: She bowls them over. Act III: Everyone is out of their seats.
‘You cannot plan any of that. My wife was crying when she saw it. Even the most cynical people I know have been moved.’
‘I Dreamed a Dream’ was one of the first songs Boublil wrote for the musical in 1979. ‘I remember I was in a car driving in the north of France and was working on
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